Wine Beneath The Palms

"Weather Girls" will pursue wine in Miami

        Florida International University enology professor Barry Gump, teaching a wine analysis class to English-speaking students at a university in Tianjin, China, sends this blog entry about two of his students. Following Chinese custom, they have given themselves English-style nicknames to please their American professor. They call themselves Sunny (left) and Windy (right). Gump calls them “my weather girls.”

        Later this year Sunny (Zhao Zixin) and Windy (Li Wenjun) will travel to FIU’s Miami campus to seek degrees in hotel and restaurant management, with the goal of working in big international hotels like Marriott and Mandarin Oriental in the U.S. and also in such big Asian cities as Shanghai, Singapore, Bangkok.

        Here, in their charming, fledgling English, are their stories.

 
Sunny --
“I started to be interested in hotel management when I was young. And I have got direct contacts with it about my internships in some industries during my three-year university life. Also, its influence on people and society fascinate me.
 
“I learned the courses of Hospitality Management very diligently and got very good scores. However, this is far from enough to face the problems from my internships, not to say achieving my career goal. The leading knowledge and the research ability which I can acquire from the further study will no doubt give me much more solid foundation and a broader vision. These two characters are indispensable for a leader or manager who wants to be successful in future fierce competitions.
 
“The Hotel Management program in FIU has its emphasis on useful applications and the education system and curriculum are related to what I’m learning now. So I believe the program will suit me pretty well. And it’s one of the best hospitality management programs in the US and it consists of leading international experts and highly regarded practicing professionals. Students in this program are from diverse backgrounds and cultures, and I can learn a great deal from such multi-culture communication.
 
“Located in Miami, the city itself provides an excellent opportunity for students to receive practical training and internships in industry. These relationships create expanded opportunities for internships and practical training in hotel areas, which will play an important role in my senior year study.”
 
Windy --
Actually, we have five girls go together [to Miami]. To answer this question, each of us will give the individual and personal reasons. What can be the same answer is that Study Abroad is one important component of our young life. For us, this chance means not only further study, but also self-realization. We hold the AMERICAN DREAM, come to the freedom kingdom, know what is best, and then reach the highest level of human desire: self-fulfillment.
 
To study in Miami is the touchstone for making a living independently mentally.  Although I am now studying far away from home, I am not independent in daily life. The phone and the internet chatting tool connives me to turn to friends and parents for help in any different situation. In most times, I gave up conquering the difficulty myself, and chose to leave them to somebody else. Maybe you may ask: “Wouldn’t you turn to the friends and parents for help after going abroad?”
 “I am trying to be independent, since I will in a new and independent environment. This social culture will push me to realize that I should be fully responsible for myself. The difference between domestic animals and wild animals is that the former have home and owner, so they do not need to face the competition in the wild world. I am so shy to say I have been a pet of my parents for 20 years, just like a domestic animal. Now I realize that it’s time to see the wild world, otherwise I will loss the capability of survival, and the truth is parents are getting older and cannot protect you all lifelong…”
 
Personally, I have strong consciousness of hardship. Every day, every week, every period of time, I would like to give myself goals and then go to achieve them. But little by little, I failed to reach the goals effectively. Until I read one book of Marx didn’t I realize what the problem was. He said: a comprehensive philosophy of the world or of human life is the guide to do anything. I totally agree with this comment and take action to perfect my philosophy of the world or of human life. So study abroad (is also live abroad), is one direct way to modify my values. It is a god-given opportunity for me. I might be benefit a lot from this experience whatever my job will be, wherever I will go, whether I lose myself.
 
So many reasons contribute to the final decision of going abroad. In brief, it will be a wonderful and hard journey. I have prepared smile and tears for it.
 
 My writing skill is far from good. Maybe it will make you confused a lot. I am trying to improve it. Sorry for tolerance it.(*^__^*) ……

 

Miami Wine and Food Festival is on

 Take advantage of the last few cool days by checking out the 14th Annual Miami Wine and Food Festival Thursday, April 23 through Saturday, April 25. It benefits Camillus House and United Way of Miami-Dade County.

 Thursday is a “Taste and Toast” event with 60 international wineries, with little dishes from local restaurants such as North One 10, Two Chefs, the River Oyster Bar, Ortanique on the Mile and others. A $150 VIP tasting begins at 6 p.m., the $75 general admission event begins at 7 p.m. It’s at Merrick Park, 358 San Lorenzo Ave., Coral Gables.

 Friday is the “Food, Friends and Fun Interactive Dinner” in which tables cook their own three-course meal under the direction of top chefs. It begins at 6:30 p.m. with a silent auction and cocktail reception with the dinner at 7:30 p.m. It’s at the JW Marriott Hotel Miami, 1109 Brickell Ave. Tickets are $250 each.

 Saturday is the “Bubbles, Bids & Bites Auction and Dinner” with live and silent auctions of travel packages and wines. It begins at 6 p.m. with a Champagne Mumm reception and silent auction, followed by the live auction and casual dinner at 7 p.m. It, too, is at the JW Marriott Miami. Tickets are $500.

 Call 305-371-WINE or see miamiwinefestival.org.

Bordeaux futures down

    Signs of the times: The 2008 Bordeaux futures market is open, with prices down 20 percent to 40 percent from 2007. Ought to be some (relative) bargains out there.

    

Red wines bring sour faces to Chinese students

 FIU enology professor Barry Gump, teaching a wine class to hotel/restaurant students at a Chinese university (pictured at right) this semester, gave them a lesson in the bitter elements in big, red wines, and found them to be an acquired taste that most of them, being unfamiliar with Western wines, had not acquired.
  He writes: Last evening we had our first exam, and I believe that most of the students survived it.  The previous evening we did an exercise on one’s sensitivity to bitterness.  Bitterness is a true taste, and usually is not something you can pick up in the nose.  Somewhere I read that we have some 50 different ways to sense bitter, and what may be bitter to you is not to someone else.
 I use a test kit to demonstrate our different abilities to sense bitter.  The kit uses little test strips with one of three chemicals on them – chemicals known to produce a bitter, super bitter, or non-bitter response depending on one’s genetic background.  With two dominant genes one is a super-bitter taster, with one dominant and one recessive gene, one is a bitter taster, and with two recessive genes, one is a non-taster – for these specific compounds.
In most of my past classes with students from many different ethnic backgrounds, I find about one-forth of the class are super tasters, about one half are tasters, and the final one-forth are non-tasters.  I like to do this exercise because I am a non-taster, and not bothered by these bitter compounds.
To my surprise I found that about half of my Tianjin class are super tasters and only a few are non-tasters for the three compounds.
I explained to my class that given the different responses across the room one should understand why the wine you are enjoying is not liked at all by your drinking companion.
Following our exercise I served an Australian Cabernet Sauvignon and an Australian Shiraz to the class and I thought you might like to see some of the students’ comments.  Jiang Feng said “this wine (the Cabernet) has bitter taste in it, but not super bitter. It also has vegetable taste in it.  It’s a little bit sour too.  The Shiraz has no bitter taste in it. It’s also sweet and spicy. A little bit sour, milky and fruity.“ 
Another student, Li Lingli, stated that “Both of the wines we tasted today have the flavor of bitter. For the Shiraz wine, the degree of the bitterness is bitter. The Cabernet wine is super bitter.”
It’s not too surprising that these two robust red wines are to date the least enjoyed by my class.  There were a lot of grimaces and unhappy faces during this tasting.  I can believe that these wines would be among those that might be “cut” with a cola beverage!

 Prof. Gump also continues his description of what it’s like to live in China for a month.
  Went into town with Mr. Fu, our usual taxi driver to visit a travel agency; Kitti and I are traveling to Xi’an tomorrow morning.  Traffic was as usual, chaotic, with an amazing mix of bicycles, cars (a lot of taxicabs), busses, and a few delivery trucks.  Lane markings were, as usual, for suggestion only, and bicycles do not seem to be bound by any traffic signals or rules.  At one intersection as the light turned green for us to go, bicycles heading from right to left on the cross street continued to move across the intersection until finally blocked off by passing cars.  One rider had to jump off his bicycle to avoid hitting the passing car – the one with the right-of-way – and then moved forward, as soon as that car had passed forcing the next car in line to pause.  A great game of “chicken” being played out on the roads every day.
  On the way back to school we traveled along one section of a new freeway – with directional arrows clearly painted on the roadway.  No surprise, I suppose, when I saw three bicycle carts coming towards us in our “fast” lane.  The amazing thing is that I have only seen one accident on the streets since arriving – these drivers must have great reflexes to keep avoiding others who casually pull into the same lane without adequate space or a signal!

Prof. Gump's wine trail leads to Beijing

 

 We visited Beijing, the capital of China, this past weekend.  My class is scheduled from Monday through Thursday so we have great opportunity to play tourist on the weekends.
Beijing is a completely gorgeous city!  It’s clean, organized, friendly, so very interesting with its history and tradition along with the very modern and contemporary.  If there is squalor and poverty we didn’t see it.
We traveled from Tianjin to Beijing on the high-speed train, which -- at 200 mph, took only half an hour to go the 130 kilometers. It was fast, smooth and cheap – only about $10.
 We were shown through Beijing by a recommended guide named Wu Hao, aka Glenn, who turned out to be very nice. It is customary, we learned, for the Chinese to take an Americanized nick name when they are in contact with English speaking folks.  We have students in my wine class class with such names as Coke, Misty, Shirley, Julia, and today we met Ringo.  This is typical of the courtesy they offer in making visitors feel at home.
Glenn’s Chinese given name is pronounced “How” (“just don’t call me How Much”). He took us by cab to our hotel, then on to a museum of cultural and social development.  There we looked at fascinating displays of the historical and modern configuration of Beijing.  Hao is a passionate student of Chinese culture and history and enriched us beyond words with his knowledge and embrace of all things Chinese. 
Our next stop was Tiananmen Square.  It’s the largest city square in the world and contains the mausoleum of Mao, the capitol building (huge!), the National Museum of treasures and the first gate to the Forbidden City. 
We also visited some local shopping areas where we learned that retail is an aggressive contact sport in China with sales tactics that make one cower into the street.   We became good “bargainers” and at Hao’s insistence learned to counter a 100 yuen price with an offer of 20.  This is great sport but not for the faint of heart.  A Yuen or is exchanged at about 6.7 per U.S. dollar or around 16 cents per Yuen.  Great bargains exist if you’re sure of what you are getting. 
On Saturday morning we had a Buick minivan and a driver to take us and Hao to the Ming Tombs and to The Great Wall.  The Ming Tombs are the final resting place of many of the Ming Dynasty Emperors located in the country at the base of a horseshoe shaped mountain foot hill area.  There are 13 tombs located in a few square miles, the oldest being the largest and subsequent tombs are all smaller than the previous ones.  The Chinese revere their ancestors and to build a tomb grander than one’s father’s would be an insult. 
The countryside was just beautiful with field crops, cherry and peach and apple blossoms.  It is quite a thrill to actually stand on the Great Wall and see it gallop over the mountains.  It is 6,530 kilometers long and is mostly original construction material hewn from the mountains it stands on.  There were lots of people there – mostly Chinese -- and all of them were in awe of the Wall. We returned to Beijing for a wonderful dinner of Beijing Duck, a fantastic dish.
On Sunday we visited the Forbidden City in the center of Beijing.  This was the main residence of the emperors since the 1400s.  It is a fabulous and extensive enclave with a moat around it.  There are three main gates to enter, all with a central arch that only the emperor may pass through.  This is a very rich and historic monument to the royalty and is continually being restored by the Chinese government, a long and expensive process.
There were at least 10,000 people there the day we went.  The only way to see some of the buildings was to literally shove your way in and be shoved back.   The on-site Museum of Treasures contained a huge amount of gold in jewelry, statues and gilded figures. 
From there we went to the Lama Temple and learned about Buddhism and saw a 26-meter statue of Buddha.  The Temple was very impressive, as were the number of visitors praying, burning incense, and the number of monks.
The last stop on Sunday was the Summer Palace, several miles from the Forbidden City.  This palace is in contrast with to Forbidden City because it has not been restored and looks very worn out and fragile.  This was the residence of the Emperors and Empresses in favorable weather and has a rich history complete with photographs of such notables as Cixi, the Empress Dowager.
 Cixi was meaner than the Wicked Witch of the West and is credited with locking her nephew, the current Emperor, into his quarters by building a brick wall around him and murdering his favorite concubine by shoving her in a well.  The property boasts the longest corridor in the world, more than ½ mile in length and is located on the property between the main compound and the hill housing the Buddhist Temples. 
On Monday we took a short trip to the Temple of Heaven.  The wonderful, large garden and grounds, and long corridor also are used by senior citizens, as a social and exercise venue.  There were all sorts of games, dances and just hangin’ out going on and a lot of happy old faces.
From there we were taken to the train station for the fast ride back to Tianjin and our evening wine class we teach at the university.  (Photo at top is Tiananmen Square with young lady in traditional costume -- In front of Mao's mausoleum. At bottom is Prof. Barry Gump at the Temple of Heaven, trying to keep a yoyo-like toy on its strings.)

Chinese wine students see the light

    Florida International University wine Prof. Barry Gump is spending the next three weeks teaching wine appreciation to English-speaking Chinese students at Tianjian University of Commerce in China. And blogging about it. Here’s his comments on his second class:

    We started with the usual “good evening, and how was your day today” with a number of responses – the students seem more relaxed now, eager to learn more about wine.

   This class covered “Visual Aspects of Wine” – color, clarity, viscosity, and effervescence (when bubbles are supposed to be present), which can impact one’s first impression about the quality of a wine.  I discussed how wines’ colors are related to specific wavelengths and energies of light. Pretty technical stuff.

   As a result, a light greenish yellow wine like sauvignon blanc has molecules in it that absorb the red/orange and green/blue wavelengths and transmit enough yellow and light green to give us the color we see.  And so on for Chardonnay and all the red wines, using a chart of colors and wavelengths.
We discussed clarity, and some causes for a cloudy wine, such as protein instability due to inadvertent heating of a wine (meaning don’t drive around in the summer with  wine in the trunk of your car!).  A cloudy wine can also result from some microbiological activity going on after the wine is bottled – and such activity rarely produces something good!

   We talked about swirling wine and how the way it coats the class is affected by the amount of alcohol in the wine and how clean the glass is. The visible viscosity of the wine gives a clue to how full it will feel in the mouth.

   I showed the class an article on how human genetics can affect a taster’s ability to taste bitter flavors.  We will test our response to some bitter compounds next week – and discuss how we all have different sensitivities to various compounds.  And this can sometimes explain why the wine you love is causing your partner to turn up his nose.

   Tonight’s wines were a Sauvignon Blanc and a Chardonnay.

   As we tasted, I opened up our wine aroma kit, which has little bottles of liquid with some of the classic aromas one might find in these two wines – lemons, pineapples, oranges, butter. The students could get out of their seats and work their way through the various flavors and aromas prior to tasting the actual wines. The class, so formal at first, is starting to relax.

New single-malt scotch is powerful stuff

 

 Even a wine freak likes a sturdier tipple at times. Here’s one that fits the bill: It’s “Astar" Glenmorangie Highland Single Malt Scotch Whisky.

  It’s a new single-malt Scotch that seems as much American as Scottish. It’s made in Scotland, but aged in barrels of American white oak from the Ozark Mountains in Missouri which are then filled with Tennessee whiskey for four years, then emptied and shipped to Scotland to mellow that country’s tipple.

 And Glenmorangie head distiller says: “We believe up to 60 percent of the flavor of the whisky comes from the wood.” Appropriately it is named Astar, which is Celtic for “journey.”

 It’s light, bright gold in color and creamy in texture, with aromas and flavors of cinnamon, licorice, caramel and roasted nuts. I liked it best with a tiny splash of water, but that’s a very personal thing among whisky sippers. I knew a man in suburban Washington, D.C. who had a well dug at his house just so he could have “branch” water for his beloved tipple, “bourbon and branch.”

  Be warned: Astar is 114.2 proof, meaning it’s 57.1% alcohol. The average scotch is closer to 40 percent. Hire a designated driver.

    It's $80.

FIU Prof. Barry Gump's first day teaching wine in China

   

 Florida International University wine Prof. Barry Gump is spending the next three weeks at Tianjian University of Commerce in China, teaching English-speaking Chinese hotel and restaurant students about how to appreciate wine. Here’s his blog from his first class. (The photo is Prof. Gump back in Miami with his FIU class.)

  My class has 47 students enrolled in it. I was quite impressed with the interest in wine.  At our first meeting I introduced myself – a chemist teaching about wine – and my wife, Kitti, who is a professional in the wine hospitality industry.   After I ramble on about wine, Kitti talks about typical items used in wine tasting rooms.  We brought an extra suitcase of foil-cutters, bottle openers and such to show the students.
  The first lecture covered the general reasons for tasting wine, developing vocabulary, and steps along the way to wine appreciation.  We discussed the “Six S’s” -- See, Swirl, Sniff, Sip, Spit, and Savor.  I also provided the class a wine wheel – a cardboard circle listing every wine aroma and flavor known to mankind, from “cut grass” to “gunflint,” and a sample of a wine evaluation form. 
  Kitti demonstrated a dozen foil cutters – devices to remove the plastic or metal seal over the cork -- and corkscrews.  And then we let various members of the class try them. Each class gets four bottles of wine to smell and taste.
  We were warned by one of the other faculty here to not expect any questions or responses from our students.   It’s how they’re expected to respond in formal classroom settings.  You can imagine how great it was when students started asking questions about points in the lecture, how to use the aroma wheel, how to manipulate the AhSo (an unusual wine bottle opener) and so on.  When asked to volunteer to cut the foil or open a bottle, we had to pick from many volunteers.
  We tasted a Sauvignon Blanc and a Chardonnay with this class, and talked about aroma, flavor, and finish/aftertaste characteristics.  Again, there were questions from a number of students, and several stayed after class to continue asking questions.  All in all a fun class tonight.

New kosher wines for Passover

   Some very nice kosher-for-Passover wines, from the Royal Wine Corp.:

· 2008 Teal Lake Sparkling Muscat, South Eastern Australia: slightly sweet, lightly effervescent, with tropical fruit flavors; good with light desserts; $15.

· 2007 Carmel Winery Carmel Ridge Dry Red Wine, from Shomron, in the heart of Biblical Israel (carignan, shiraz, petite sirah and cabernet sauvignon grapes): spicy red plum flavors, soft and round; $20.

· 2007 Flechas de Los Andes Gran Malbec, Mendoza, from a new winery in Argentina by the French wine families Rothschild and Dassault: violet aromas, mulberry flavors, powerful, rich and smooth, with a long finish; $30.

    The wines are available at Amazing Savings in North Miami Beach, Kosher Kingdom in Aventura and Kosher Marketplace in Boca Raton.

         

Matzoh ball soup: To your health

      Just in time for Passover comes word from Japanese medical researchers that matzoh ball soup is even better for you than your grandmother always said. Seems the chicken soup is packed with collagen proteins, which lower blood pressure. The proteins come not from the chicken breast, but from the legs and feet. So be sure to include them in the recipe. (See above for kosher wines.)